Karl Friedrich is proud to live in Karl Marx Hof, Vienna's vast monument to municipal socialism. But not as proud as he used to be.

"We had great times here. There were artists and writers all around. Great parties. They're all gone now," says the former communist. "Now half the families in my block are immigrants. They can't speak German. They can't even speak English."

Built in the 1920s to house the working class of the post-imperial capital, Karl Marx Hof was one of the first social housing schemes in Europe, an expressionist fortress of the left in "Red Vienna" and then a battleground in Austria's civil war that pitted the socialists against the neo-fascists in the 1930s.

Gottfried, an 80-year-old who has lived here most of his life, remains loyal to the political creed that automatically went with the address.

"I'm a worker. I grew up with the socialists, always voted for them," he says, declining to give his surname. "And I'll be voting for them again on Sunday. How could it be otherwise?"

The problem for Austria's Social Democrats, hoping to win an early general election on Sunday triggered by the collapse of the coalition government of Social and Christian Democrats, is that Gottfried is a member of a dying breed - the core voters of the centre-left.

"Everybody here used to vote socialist. But on Sunday a lot of people here will vote for the [far right] Freedom party," says Friedrich, who hopes the centre-left and hard right will form a new taboo-breaking coalition.

His hunch is borne out by the opinion polls, which predict a surge in support for the anti-immigrant populists of the extreme right, not least because of the inroads they are making into what used to be the guaranteed support for the Social Democrats.

"The Freedom party is now the most proletarian party in Austria," says Anton Pelinka, an Austrian political scientist. "If you look at Vienna, the Freedom party is doing very well in the working class districts."

That spells trouble for Austria's Social Democrats (SPO), whose own leader and chancellor, Alfred Gusenbauer, committed political suicide in June by pandering to the main tabloid newspaper and turning Eurosceptic. The U-turn brought down the government and ended Gusenbauer's career. But the problem is more fundamental.

"Austrian social democracy," says Fritz Plasser, a leading analyst, "is in a deep crisis, over its identity, over its programme, and over its prospects."

The same might be said about almost anywhere you look in Europe. If Labour is anxious about Gordon Brown and the prospects of electoral meltdown, the picture is similarly grim for the centre-left in Germany, France, Italy and beyond.

Demoralisation

In eight general elections over the past year in Europe from Poland to Ireland and from Finland to Greece, the centre-left has suffered defeat. Only in Spain and Portugal does the centre-left remain solidly in power. Almost everywhere else the mood among social democrats is one of demoralisation and confusion, with hapless leaders adding to the disarray and incapable of drafting popular policies on salient issues such as immigration or the turmoil resulting from free markets and globalised economics.

"All economics nowadays are borderless, while politics still has national borders," says Pelinka. "National governments can do less and less and national politics are in decline."

If true, this appears to hurt the left more than the centre-right, which claims it is more in tune with the zeitgeist.

"We've won the ideological battle. The culture and moral relativism that the left spread around from the 1980s, we're leaving it behind," the French prime minister, François Fillon, told a conference of 70 centre-right parties this summer.

Fillon's confidence might be misplaced. Since taking power last year he and President Nicolas Sarkozy have sunk to ever lower levels of popularity in France, according to the TNS-Sofres pollsters. But this apparent weakness does not translate into gains for the opposition Socialists, who have lost three presidential elections in a row and are mired in a six-way battle to decide who will become the party leader.

What has historically been Europe's biggest and oldest political party, Germany's Social Democrats or SPD, is haemorrhaging support, bogged down in internal fighting and policy confusion, despite coalescing in government with Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. If the extreme right is eating away at the Social Democrats in Austria, in Germany it is the hard left that is stealing the SPD vote in what might be described as old east Germany's revenge.

The new party, called simply the Left, the rump of cold war east German communists joined by west German SPD defectors, is polling at 15%, mainly at the expense of the SPD, which slumped to 20% in the polls this summer under the leadership of Kurt Beck, who has just been ousted in a coup by the right wing of the party.

The popular foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will now challenge Merkel for the chancellorship next year. But while he might halt or reverse the SPD's decline, Steinmeier is a civil servant who has never stood for elected office or held senior party political jobs.

In Italy the predicament for the mainstream left seems even more dismal as it struggles to present a coherent challenge to the rightwing populist Silvio Berlusconi, who is enjoying high poll ratings despite immigration controversies, the collapse of the national carrier, Alitalia, and the Naples rubbish crisis since being re-elected prime minister in April.

"He who maintains a coalition in Italy governs and Veltroni can't," says James Walston, a political scientist at the American University in Rome of the centre-left leader, Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome who heads the new Democratic party. The new movement is crippled by old splits and rivalries between secular and Roman Catholic leftists.

As in Austria, the populist parties of the far right, the Northern League and the post-fascist National Alliance, are also attracting traditional leftist voters on issues such as immigration.

Populist

In Karl Marx Hof, Gottfried is confident that despite the sliding fortunes of the centre-left his Social Democrats will win on Sunday. He may well be right. Under a new populist leader, Werner Faymann, who has the support of the Kronenzeitung bestselling tabloid, the SPO is narrowly ahead in opinion polls at around 30% after promising a spending bonanza, the slashing of VAT on food and the abolition of student fees.

But that result would be a historic low for the Social Democrats, five percentage points down on two years ago and seven down on 2002. The real victor looks likely to be the far right, tipped to take a quarter of the vote, 10 points up on two years ago. "The paradox," says Pelinka, "is that the Social Democrats will get the worst result in their history, and still declare victory."